American Rhapsody (44 page)

Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Now I had to deal with the draft. I thought the war was immoral. I was head over heels in love. And I was the son of a senator from a rural state who'd be up for reelection in two years.

My dad told me to make my own decision and that whatever it was, he'd support it. If nothing else worked, Tipper wanted to go to Canada. But Mother laid it down: If I didn't go into the service, I'd destroy my dad's political career.

I enlisted. Tipper and I cried and held each other. It wasn't fair, but I felt I didn't have any choice. I could not destroy my father's life. I even volunteered for Vietnam. I knew how good that would look for my dad—to have a son in combat during a campaign.

I was assigned to Fort Rucker. “Mother Rucker,” we called it. I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't recognize the grunt in the buzz cut I was looking at. I called Tipper, in her senior year now, every day. I hung out with soldiers who hated the war as much as I did.

On weekends, some of the guys and I would rent a motel room and get stoned, listening to Cream and Hendrix and Zeppelin. I saw and loved
Easy Rider, M*A*S*H,
and
The Strawberry Statement
. I read and loved
Dune, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. Meanwhile, I'd won “Supernumerary of the Guard” three times for having the sharpest-looking uniform and the shiniest boots.

I almost got into trouble once—picked up by state troopers in a field near a freeway, looking for the perfect four-leaf clover to give to a buddy headed for Nam. I explained to the state troopers what I was doing and why, and, thank God, they let me go.

Our wedding was at the National Cathedral, right next door to St. Albans. The love of my life wore a train of white lace and carried a bouquet of orchids and white carnations. I wore army dress blues. The organist played the Beatles. She loved me! Yeah yeah yeah!

We moved to Rucker, lived in a trailer full of cockroaches, and drove a VW camper. We stayed in bed much of the time. I felt alive again. She was there, holding my hand, touching me, making me laugh. I thanked God each night and day for His blessing.

Dad was in trouble. The Vilest Man had targeted him. Because of his friendship with the Kennedys, he was being attacked as “the third senator from Massachusetts.” Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, wrote a memo telling an aide that “Gore's cocktail-party liberalism offers a chance to rebut his folksy image” and told the aide to dig up a list of dinner parties Mother and Dad had attended, including the menus—“the Frenchier the better.”

Dad's Nixon-picked Republican opponent said, “Our college campuses are infested with drug peddlers, our courts are disrupted, buildings bombed, schools threatened. Our law officers are threatened, beaten, and murdered. Pornography pollutes our mailboxes. Criminal syndicates infiltrate legitimate businesses. Rapists, robbers, and burglars make our streets and homes unsafe.” Dad and liberals like him, of course, in this vilest view of the world, were to blame.

I tried to help Dad as much as I could. We did a TV ad together, with me in uniform, where Dad said, “Son, always love your country.” Dad even got his fiddle out again after all these years and played “Turkey in the Straw,” but it didn't do much good. His ads showed him riding a horse or playing checkers with the old-timers on the courthouse lawn. The Nixon people portrayed him as a man out of touch with his constituents, a wealthy social snob in a Tyrolean hat and a red vest, a man who fought for the little guy but couldn't stand his presence, the southern regional chairman of the eastern liberal establishment.

Ironically, even my attempt to help him by volunteering for Vietnam proved useless. I'd go to Vietnam, I was told, on the first transport
after
the election.

“A damnation!” my dad called it, when he lost on election night. “The causes for which we fought are not dead,” he said. “The truth shall rise again.”

I cried, for Dad and for myself. I had enlisted in a war I hated in order to help him. And now he had lost anyway. And after he had lost, I was going to Vietnam, risking my life for nothing, leaving behind and alone the woman who was my life.

Rat fuck
. I had rat-fucked myself.

How's that for a Naomi Wolf word?

I was in-country for six months. I was a military journalist. I talked about Tipper so much that a buddy, Mike O'Hara, felt like he knew her.

I smoked a lot of dope. I bummed a lot of cigarettes. I listened to a lot of music. I bodysurfed, pulled O'Hara out of a riptide, and saved his life. The guys called me “Brother Buck,” not Al Gorf, and told me I “had my shit in the bag.”

I heard that Tipper was depressed and crying all the time. I was depressed and crying when no one could hear me.

I took my turn regularly on the perimeter in those little firebases out in the boonies. Someone would move; we'd fire first and ask questions later.

I saw men and women cut in half by Huey gunships.

I never had to come face-to-face with someone whom I had either to kill or be killed by.

I promised God that if I survived, I would atone for my sins, and purify myself.

I blasted Dylan and dreamed about Tipper.

Our company had a pet snake, a mammoth python we called “Moonbeam.” It ate the pack rats, which were everywhere around us, but it liked chickens the best.

We'd go into the villages and buy fat chickens and then we'd offer the chickens to Moonbeam, who'd swallow them in one gulp.

I watched that python devouring, its eyes lidded, cruel, and impassive. Stoned one night, watching it feed, I thought, The snake is Vietnam, swallowing America.

Tipper Gore! Tipper Galore! I'm here! I'm back! I made it! I survived! God did I miss you! God do I love you! Oh my God, I love you so much, so much, so much, so much.

Tipi Tipi Tin, Tipi Tipi Tan, Tipi Tan Tipi Tan—all day, all night, Tipi Tan Tipi Tan, all day all night in the sand . . .

I was angry and bitter. She soothed me. I had dreams of carnage and bloodshed. She healed me. I went to divinity school and atoned. She helped me. I purified myself. She held me. I became a newspaper reporter at a place that had already hired Bobby Kennedy's son, Arthur Schlesinger's son, and Hank Aaron's daughter. Tipper took pictures.

We made a baby. Then we made another baby.

I wasn't a very good newspaper reporter. We had to do something with our lives. What should we do? Live on a commune and grow vegetables? Live by the sea and paint and write?

We had babies now. We were parents now.

What should I do, Tipper Gore, Tipper Galore, Tipi Tipi Tin, Tipi Tipi Tan?

Should I run for Congress?

Yes.

Yes?

Yes!

She kissed me.

I made my announcement, and just before I did, I threw up.

 . . .

We moved back to Washington when I was elected and lived in the same house in Arlington where she grew up. The girls went to the same public elementary school she had gone to. The school crossing guard was the same one who had helped her cross the street.

Mother tried to buy “proper Washington clothes” for Tipper, until I stopped it. My wife was more beautiful, curvier, than I'd ever seen her. She built a darkroom in the house and freelanced some of her photographs. She worked in volunteer shelters for the homeless. She wore jeans and was mostly barefoot at home.

I was a congressman. I wore a blue suit, a red tie, and scuffed shoes every day. I kept a computer to one side in my office and a case of Tab on the other. I came up with my first nationally quoted good line: “The tax system is a national joke that hurts when you laugh.” I studied every issue myself that I was interested in. I didn't want staffers making decisions for me. I investigated unsafe infant formula. I found a conspiracy to overprice contact lenses. I held hearings to toughen warnings on cigarette packs. I held hearings on organ donations. I learned that if you want to get your colleagues' attention in Congress, the best way is to let them see you on TV or in the paper.

I played basketball at the House gym. Al Gorf was the master of trick shots. Al Gorf could carom the ball off the rear gym wall and get it into the basket. Al Gorf could lie on his back at half court and throw it over his head for a score.

The beautiful Mrs. Tipper Gore and I attended formal state dinners, where she nibbled my ear.

We had three girls. We wanted a boy. We read a book. We put it into practice.

Tipi Tipi Tin, Tipi Tipi Tan . . . but she wasn't . . . tan. She was snow-white back there. No tight underwear for me, lots of coffee, deep, deep penetration, and no missionary position.

Deep, deep penetration, over and over again, at her thermometer's beck and call, in those dazzling mounds of miraculous snow.

We got our boy.

She was angry. The baby-sitter had brought home a Prince CD and the last song on it, “Darling Nikki,” said, “I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine.”

There were videos on MTV that the girls were talking about. Van Halen's “Hot for Teacher”—in which a teacher stripped—and “Mötley Crüe's “Looks Can Kill”—with women kept in cages by men wearing leather.

Tipper set up the group called Parents' Music Resource Center with other congressional wives. She went public. There was my beautiful wife on the CBS evening news talking about “Bondage and oral sex at gunpoint.” There she was at home, telling me that Prince sprayed his audience with water to simulate a woman's body fluid, that Wendy Williams pretended to masturbate onstage with a jackhammer.

The music industry lashed back at her. Frank Zappa, who'd been one of our favorites at Harvard, called her a Nazi. Wendy Williams told her that she was just afraid our own daughters would masturbate.

I was proud of the strength of her conviction, but I wondered, Are we getting old? What about the Stones' ”Starfucker” and the Kingsmen's “Louie Louie” and all those other daring rock songs we'd laughed about in school? Tipper was the one who'd loved rock and roll raunchiness, while I was the McCartney fan. She seemed to almost obsess about Prince and how he'd appear onstage naked in a purple bathtub. But wasn't that just rock and roll showbiz, not all that far removed from James Brown's cape?

She laughed when she heard Ice-T's response to her . . . but I couldn't.

“Think I give a fuck about some silly bitch named Gore? Yo, PMRC, here we go, raw. Yo, Tip, what's the matter? You ain't gettin no dick? Your bitchin' about rock and roll, that's censorship, dumb bitch.”

I couldn't even bear to tell her about the tape that had been sent to every member of Congress, the tape that all the staffers were listening to and cackling about:

She got pouty lips

She got juicy tits

She got hungry hips

She got funky pits

Ride, Tipper, Ride

Your lips so wide

Ride, Tipper, Ride

You're burnin up inside

She got big blue eyes

She got a hefty size

She got milky thighs

She got cherry pies

Ride, Tipper, Ride

Don't pay Al no mind

Ride, Tipper, Ride

Baby go hog-wild

Ride, Tipper, Ride

Wiggle that behind

Ride, Tipper, Ride

Move it side to side

We both laughed when she finally got support from a rock superstar who said she was right. Paul McCartney!

She hung in, though, and never backed off. A few years later, when I was running for president, she said, “We're just trying to get his name recognition up to mine.”

I ran for president and got my butt kicked—Mother sent me a note that said, “Smile. Relax. Attack”—and our boy got hit by a car and we nursed him back to health.

I wrote a best-selling book and got tagged as “the Ozone Man,” and Tipper and I and the kids went out on a houseboat, where I grew a beard, and we decided I wasn't going to run for president again.

Tipper got up on a stage and played drums with the Grateful Dead. And at a National Correspondents Association dinner, with photographers all around, she stuck her tongue deep into my mouth.

When Bill Clinton asked me to be his vice-presidential running mate, she didn't want me to do it. We had decided on that houseboat to focus on us and the kids. But I remembered what my dad had said at the moment he lost: “The truth shall rise again!” So Tipper said, “Okay, here we go. Let's save the world.”

I liked Bill Clinton. I thought he wanted to do good things for America and I knew I could help him. He was an instinctive politician and I was a cerebral one. He went with his gut and I went with my head. He was John Lennon and I . . . would always be Paul McCartney.

I knew how different we were. We were jogging in Little Rock before the convention and he said, “Ooh, lookit that ass!” as we jogged by some high school girls. He liked to tease, too. When Perot dropped out, he called me and said, “I'm pickin' a new VP. You were my choice in a three-man race, but now we're down to two and I'm goin' with Bob Kerrey.”

Tipper and I did a bus tour all over the Midwest with Bill and Hillary, and that's when I saw, for the first time, how much Tipper liked him. He made such a huge deal out of the fact that he and Tipper shared the same birthday. He was touching her all the time—casual little touches on the arm or the elbow, holding her blue eyes with his, telling her how much of an “asset” she was going to be to the campaign.

She told him about her mother's hospitalization for depression, and right away he told her he was going to make her the head of a White House mental health program. We were supposed to leave two days into the tour, but Tipper was having so much fun, she said, meeting the crowds, she said, that she wanted to stay another two days.

Watching Bill with her, watching Bill with other women on the campaign, I felt that what somebody had said in the paper was right: Tipper and I were about to become national chaperones while the country was going off on a blind date with its first rock and roll president.